Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was a guest on Fox & Friends and said: “The scientific research base of the United States of America is the research university. We made that decision 80 years ago. We don’t have a Plan B.”
Rice, director of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a conservative public policy think tank focused on free enterprise, added, “I am a major believer in making sure that we are able to continue the kind of research that produced the stem cell revolution, that produced, actually at Stanford, the double Helix, that produced the heart transplant.”
She added: “We have to make sure, especially at a time when we are being challenged by China along the technological front.”
BREAKING: Condoleezza Rice just went on Fox & Friends and dismantled Trump’s war on universities and scientific research.
— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) June 4, 2025
When even Bush’s Secretary of State is side-eyeing your assault on knowledge and education, you’ve officially crossed into uncharted stupidity.
This isn’t… pic.twitter.com/ZvtV72e6IX
[Note: The Hoover Institution at Stanford University, which takes its name from its founder — Stanford alum and 31st President of United States Herbert Hoover — reportedly receives nearly half of its funding from private gifts, primarily from individual contributions, and the other half from its endowment.]
When asked “But you also agree that to get a message to these universities, funding is basically the only way that it gets their attention?” Rice replied, “I don’t know, I just want to make sure, when we come out of all of this, that scientific funding is intact because, we will pay a price if we don’t have scientific funding to do the things that led to this magnificent innovation that we have.”
Note: In June 2023, a former student fellow at the Hoover Institution (Julia Steinberg) wrote an article for The Stanford Review entitled ‘Hoover’s Double-Bind: Woke For Me, But Not For Thee,’ with the subtitle, “The Hoover Institution puts on a conservative show for its donors, but the reality is that Hoover is abandoning its conservative roots.”
That “conservative show” — in the case of the Hoover Institution — is not hard to cast: Hoover alumni and fellows include Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the economist Milton Friedman, and conservative scholar and popular historian Niall Ferguson.
